


The Lightning Queen

by Sister of Silence (EmpressofMankind)



Series: The Retirement AU [2]
Category: Horus Heresy - Various Authors, Warhammer 40.000, Warhammer 40k (Novels) - Various Authors
Genre: Gen, Legio Custodes (WH40K), Primarch drama, Retirement AU, Thunder Warriors (WH40K)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-20
Updated: 2017-07-20
Packaged: 2018-12-04 15:06:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11557719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmpressofMankind/pseuds/Sister%20of%20Silence
Summary: The Crusade era is over, the Emperor retired to a garden planet with various of the primarchs and we all attempt really hard to Live Happily Ever After™. Attempt being the keyword, because shit is going sideways. Fast.





	The Lightning Queen

Tribune Arlette Augusta Amon Rakaposhi Gorro glanced across the edge of the ‘Terra Today’ disposable slate she’d been pretending to read when she heard the front door. She rose and moved to the window overlooking the old manor’s driveway. Horus and the Emperor stood upon the porch, His hands clasped behind His back. They exchanged words, the primarch was going home. The situation with Sanguinius grew direr by the day. She raised her hand when Horus looked up. He returned the greeting and turned to leave.

Arlette put the slate down and left the upper parlour. She crossed the wooden landing and descended the stairs just as the Emperor returned inside. He’d been wearing the same, grey turtleneck and blue jeans under His lab coat for the past three days and it was beginning to show. She raked a hand through His long hair, but it was no use.

“You need to rest and take a bath,” she observed. “The aquatherapy room has been restored. We’ve been waiting to use it.”

“That’s sweet of you, but don’t keep them from enjoying it on my account,” He replied. “I need to find a cure to Sanguinius’ ailment before his condition deteriorates so far that such a solution will be superfluous.”

“Yes, you do,” she agreed. “But you can’t very well do that when you’re out cold from lack of sustenance and relaxation.”

He smiled then and reached up to stroke her brown cheek. “You know it’ll take more than that to keep me down.” However, her frown only creased deeper. She was worried, He could tell. “Two more days,” He offered. “Then we’ll ride up to Valadilene and stay the weekend. How’s that?”

Arlette pursed her lips but nodded. “Two days. We leave restday morning.” A smile tugged at the corner of her lips then. “I’m telling Coskun.”

He chuckled at that. “If you must.”

“Yes,” she added and pressed a kiss against His lips. “Wouldn’t want to have you try and back out of it.” The animal would be insufferable if He did and the horse had a long, long psychic breath.

He smiled and returned her kiss. “I should continue my research.”  
Arlette shook her head with a smile. “Go.”

She watched Him leave, then turned to the tall window beside the ornate front door and looked up at the darkening sky. It was midday, but the skies churned as if preparing for a storm. High above, against the unnatural dark, she could make out the tightly clustered lights of warships in orbit. They were cloaked, their lights mimicking the constellations whose names they bore: Ursus, Callisto and Sagittarius. The star signs had no business being that close together in this hemisphere, but few knew enough of astronomy to notice.

Sanguinius his condition was swiftly becoming a danger to everyone around him. A potential devastation zone that was growing larger by the day. If the Emperor was unable to find a cure in time, they would need an alternative plan to deal with the rapidly devolving primarch. She had such a plan. She dreaded putting it in action, but that didn’t make it less necessary. She pressed the long-range, encrypted voxbead in her ear, disguised as part of her aquila-shaped earring. “Eagle returns to roost. Rest beta-sub-seven. Crescent Dawn?”

“Confirmed. Crescent Dawn rising,” a familiar voice crackled back from across the stratosphere. She had not heard it in centuries. “Pattern?”

“Hold Aegis-VI D,” Arlette instructed as she made her way to her private parlour on the third floor, beside the upper library.

“Confirmed. Hold Aegis-VI D.”

Arlette broke the uplink and strode into the parlour. It’s simple, practical décor of natural materials and colourful fabrics echoed the endless tundras she’d left behind on Terra. A view of Khan Tengri’s dramatic, steep, snow-covered peak from the outstretched plains dominated the parlour. Arlette smiled faintly when her gaze moved across it, as she always did upon entering. It made her recall the sunny afternoon she had painted it, during their trip up Engilchek glacier.

A narrow, wood carved end table stood beneath the painting. Various curious memorabilia upon it, including a musical box. It read ‘Charlotte’ on the dark lid in elegant, gilded letters surrounded by finely crafted marquetry poppies. The Emperor had made it for her, many millennia ago, at the dawn of M2. He’d always been fond of automatons and not half bad at making them. Perturabo was just like Him, in that. No doubt it was why He’d offered they go to Valadilene: some of the Imperium’s finest clockmakers lived in the secluded, rustic, little mountain village. Perhaps she should invite the primarch along? He’d enjoy it there.

She gently wound the musical box and the lid popped open to show a painted forest and two mechanical deer, frolicking to the tune of a soft lullaby. However, she didn’t stop turning the delicate handle. Three times, five times, nine times… until it popped off revealing it’s pin to be a key. She took it and crossed the parlour to the life-size painting of the Emperor and herself, each carrying a large, bicephalic eagle, against a backdrop of mountains and blue, blue sky. She remembered that afternoon fondly, too. Arlette grabbed the ornate frame with both hands and pulled. Slowly, the heavy painting moved aside on its rails and revealed an alcove with oddly spaced planks loaded with old books.

Without hesitation, she pulled out a thick tome titled ‘The Legions of Ancient Terra’. Behind it, sunk into the woodwork, was a small keyhole. She put the musical box key in and twisted it. A mechanism somewhere under the wood boarding below her feet whirred and clicked. She crouched down, moving her hands across the alcove’s bottom panel, feeling for the popped end of the lid. When she found it, she pressed and slid it aside, uncovering a cast iron handle welded into a sturdy anchor block. She took it with both hands, put her shoulders under it and pushed up. She grunted with effort, muscles flexing as she rose. With the grinding of reluctant ball bearings the alcove split, the pseudo bookcase moving up and disappearing on rails into the wall. Sweat beaded on her forehead by the time she had straightened and the handle clicked into its latch in the ceiling. No mortal would be able to open it on their own, even if they did find it. She stepped through into the passage beyond and pulled the painting back into place behind her.

The passage was a crawl space running between the inner and outer walls of the manor, more than anything. Its sides were all untreated wood and rough brickwork. She had to turn her shoulders sideways to fit through. It was colder here, too. She wound her way left and right, around the library. Then ducked under a support beam and climbed over a half wall into one of the old servants’ passages. This particular one led from the library into the secondary basement, which had once been their wine cellar. However, to keep the children safe from the steep stairwell they had bricked it up on the library’s side. The secondary basement hadn’t been used since.

She descended the rickety, open, wooden stairs and the atmosphere grew colder yet as she did so. It took her all the way to the ground floor, behind the kitchen, and then further down still. She stepped down onto the packed earth of the basement’s antechamber. It was lined with sad, empty wine racks covered in cobwebs. She moved on into the main cellar, which was a convex space of rough brickwork squeezed between the foundation pillars of the manor. A large, suspiciously modern and clearly new apparatus dominated the cellar, making the decently sized basement seem cramped. The machine consisted of concentric focus rings, five metres in diameter and stacked one upon the other as high as the ceiling would allow. Each ring had a gap, which currently lined up to form an entrance into it. The rings were held in position by two sturdy arches that connected overhead. A large cogitator bank was connected to one side, thick cables piled around it.

Arlette entered the machine and observed her handiwork with a critical eye, double checking its physical connectors. She then moved to the cogitator to verify its preprogrammed quadrants and triangulation matrices. She had smuggled the machine into the basement part by part and constructed it herself. It had taken her several weeks, but now it was done. When she was satisfied that everything was in order, she turned the machine on. Its rings started to move, slowly at first but faster with each passing second. She put a hand on the cogitator unit and braced herself as she looked up where the sky would be, even though there was only hardwood flooring to see. The machine’s resonance hum grew in strength and then pitch as artificial lightning leapt within the spinning rings, casting stark shadows across the basement.

The boom of violent air displacement was sudden and deafening. Its force shook dust from the ceiling and threw the boxes and bags into the confining walls with enough force to crumple them. Arlette leant against the blast, her deel flapping around her like a living thing. The rings slowed and lined up once more. From within them stepped five warriors, their dull auramite plate decorated with lightning bolts and a radiant sun cresting the arch of their chestplates. Their wargear had been upgraded and modified to disguise their original nature. Only those intimately familiar with the Legio Custodes’ wargear would be able to see the small differences that remained.

One of the tall warriors took off his visored helmet as they approached her. His features were hardened by genehancing and warfare but remained the same golden brown as the Emperor, their ethnic kinship still vaguely discernible under the crude facial squaring typical of early modification techniques. His long, dark hair was braided in an elaborate pattern she could read as easily as the Legio’s honour scroll work even though she had not seen its like in centuries. The left side of his once handsome face was marked with Unification tattoos, denoting the many campaigns he’d served. There could be no doubt as to who he was: Egil Kanthor, the last remaining Thunder Lord.

He struck his fist against his chestplate in the pre-Unification salute, a gesture Arlette mirrored. They clasped hands and leant their foreheads together in greeting. “It is good to see you once more, my Empress,” he rumbled, his slow, deep speech a hint laborious. “And to be awake and draw breath for myself.”

Arlette nodded in agreement but didn’t smile. “I fear you will have to suffer stale air a while longer. If we show our hand too soon, all will be lost as surely as if you weren’t here.”

“The situation is dire, then,” he observed as they crossed the cellar to a large, steel trap door sequestered in the far corner. His warriors fell in step behind him.

“I would not have had you and your remaining kin woken for less,” Arlette said. It took both of them to lift the trap door, uncovering a vertical stairwell and rungs set directly into the bedrock.

Egil’s face twitched, as if a smile had attempted to shape it but hadn’t quite made it. “I would not have minded an idle waking.”

“We both know that cannot be,” Arlette said as she crouched down to descend the stair. He gave her a hand which she took even though she didn’t need it. “Your time remaining with us is finite and it tickles away no matter how much we slow it. We cannot waste it idly.”

“I am aware,” he replied and followed her down. As they descended a second boom rolled overhead, shortly after followed by a third, a fourth…

The stairwell led them more than fifty metres down into the bedrock of the cliff below the manor. As they descended the air became increasingly dank and ripe with wet mud. They stepped down into a rough-hewn passage and followed it further into the earth until it abruptly opened up into a gargantuan underground cavern edging on still black waters. Lichen clung to the moist walls and the sound of dripping water echoed from an indiscernible direction. The banks of the cavern were lined with simple cots and storage trunks as far as the eye could see.

“How is our Emperor?” Egil asked as he surveyed his and his warriors’ accommodations for the foreseeable future. They would suffice.

“Determined,” Arlette replied as she crossed her arms, her gaze boring into the placid water as if she could read the answers to her problems from its murky depths. “But it has taken a heavy toll on Him. It is taking too long.”

Egil glanced at her, noting the tenacious glint in her green eyes that squinted her epicanthic fold just so. He hadn’t seen that expression in a lifetime but recalled it fondly even though the circumstances that warranted it were ever dire. “You fear for His safety?”

Warriors filed into the cavern from the passage behind them, moving in groups as they took up camp spots. Arlette shifted her gaze from the water to Egil. “You remember when the Thunder Legion’s glitch first manifested,” she replied, her tone quiet now. “What devastation it left in its wake. What toll it took on the Emperor.”

“I do, “ Egil asserted as he put a hand on her shoulder. “And we will follow you, as we did then. For our Emperor and the survival of His empire.”

She nodded, sadness swimming behind her eyes, and touched her hand to his, almost as an afterthought. “We nearly lost Him when it took Taranis.”

Egil’s jaw set as he recalled the events that would ultimately lead to the battle of Mount Ararat and the infamous Thunder Lord’s death. All their deaths, at least in name. A shameful ruse, but a necessary one. “You fear He may overbalance on that precipice again?”

Arlette bit her lip, her expression painful as her gaze returned to the water. “I fear He already has.”

Egil’s expression darkened with determination at her words. “He will find an end to the primarch’s affliction,” he asserted as he gave her shoulder a squeeze that would have ground a mortal’s bones to dust. “And if He does not, we will.”

**Author's Note:**

> A lot of time and hard work went into the creation and publication of this story and as such it is very dear to me. I would love to hear what you thought of it! If you decide to share my story, please credit and link back to me. Thank you!


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